Doing a placement year can be an invaluable opportunity, which can help inform you of whether the career path you’re working towards is right for you. It also helps boost your applications for both the workforce and post-graduate qualifications. Learning skills on the job and seeing what you learn be applied in real time in front of your eyes is far more effective than simply reading about what you’re learning. Therefore, as a current placement student, I would like to share with you my top tips (in no particular order) on how I have been making the most out of my placement year!
1) Writing down your roles and what you’ve done
This was something that the assistant psychologist at my placement told me to do right before she left in October, and I’ve found this incredibly helpful. Essentially, once you get inducted into your various roles, you should write down for each individual role or duty:
- The steps/procedure on how to complete the role
- What specific skills are you using and developing while doing this role
- Why the role in question is important to the organisation you’re working with.
Similarly to above, you should note down any achievements or extra things you’ve done beyond your job description, including what that involved and what you and your organisation gained from it.
This will make the job application process so much easier if you note it as you go. You can easily translate some of what you have written onto your CV and talk about these in future interviews. Even if you’re not applying for anything at the moment, writing your processes down in detail can help wrap your head around your responsibilities and can also help increase your understanding of strategic awareness within your organisation. If you do this from the beginning, this will make the induction process in your first weeks less daunting and will offer a valuable space for self-reflection throughout the year.
2) Asking questions…
I’ll summarise this point into two subsections, as I believe that both are important for making the most out of your placement.
a) …If you’re unsure or lost
Feeling lost or unsure about certain work processes or how to do things is completely normal – your placement supervisor will be aware of you being unfamiliar with things at first, especially as you most likely don’t have the qualifications or experience that everyone else in the team has. Your supervisor’s role is to help you out, so don’t hesitate to reach out to them for answers, even if you think the question might be silly. If anything, asking loads of questions is just going to make you look both proactive and genuinely interested in your work, which is something you should aim to be anyway. Win-win.
b) …about extra opportunities
This might not be something you do straight away, especially if you’re still familiarising yourself with your core roles. However, once you become more confident in your placement, you should ask for additional opportunities. For example, this could involve shadowing or observing meetings you wouldn’t otherwise be involved in. Perhaps you could even reach out to ask if you can help a colleague with a research project on the side, or volunteer at a work event. Of course, what these extra opportunities entail will depend on the organisation or company you’re working for; however, it’s always worth keeping an eye out for any potential opportunities for you to jump at. You might end up gaining valuable experience that you wouldn’t have gotten the chance to get otherwise. Just make sure that you don’t end up biting off more than you can chew - even more so if your role is voluntary! Either way, your mental health should be your top priority.
3) Use your placement to inform your dissertation
Once again, this will depend on what your placement is specifically about, and whether what you’re doing at the moment aligns with and is relevant to your research interests. However, there may be opportunities for you to see the consequences of research gaps play out in your workplace. For example, do you notice any flaws in the way your workplace currently operates, or any challenges faced by the organisation? Is this something backed by current research, and thus, does the research in question have any apparent gaps? Thinking of the wider picture like this could act as the beginning of your brainstorming towards a more concrete dissertation idea. Again, you can always reach out to a colleague or your supervisor, as they might be able to guide you a bit more on this - especially if your interests align closely with their specialities.
On a similar note, once you have a more concrete idea of what you want to study in your final year, see if it is possible to either gather primary data while on placement or use preexisting secondary data (for example, from past audits or research carried out within your organisation) that your organisation already has records of.
Of course, this will require permission from your workplace and awareness of trust research and ethics processes, and a discussion with your dissertation supervisor. If possible, this could lighten your workload in your final year.
However, don’t be disheartened if you wish for your dissertation to take on a completely different approach to what you’re doing at work, or if you aren’t allowed to gather/take and use data from your placement. If you don’t have any data collected by the beginning of your final year, it is still totally fine and normal – many people won’t, myself included.
4) Growing your professional network
If you end up really enjoying your placement role and organisation, this could be a great opportunity for you to make connections beyond those you’d be making through university alone. Networking through your placement may be even more useful, as they will be with people who got to know you professionally for up to a year, and these will likely be connections in a field you’re interested in. At the end of the day, it wouldn’t hurt to reach out to people from your former placement after your studies!
For example, it’s not totally unheard of for former undergraduate placement students to get offered full-time grad jobs at their former workplace after they finish final year. However, the chances of this happening will depend on various external factors, such as whether further qualifications are required for any permanent roles in your organisation, and whether there are any vacancies by the time you graduate. Of course, this also depends on whether you have proved yourself to be a good fit in the company during your time working there.
Regardless, you can still keep in contact with your colleagues or other placement students you’ve met during placement after finishing. They may provide guidance and support when it comes to navigating a competitive job market in a common field of interest and might even vouch for you when it comes down to references.
5) Flexibility while setting targets and goals
Setting targets and goals might be something that you already have to do as part of your placement, such as with the Personal Outcomes and Learning Objectives (POLO) worksheets that I, as a psychology student, have been required to do. Of course, everyone knows that noting down your goals is useful, and for me, this assignment served as a good starting point in thinking about what exactly I wanted to get out of my placement. However, I ruminated on my initial goals for months after submitting that assignment in October, wondering whether what I had set for myself then was still a good fit and reflective of what I wanted to, and could, achieve. Therefore, I personally felt the need to set new targets for myself and slightly tweak my SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, timed) goals where I deemed fit.
Sometimes you find that the goals you set during your first month in placement are completely different to the goals you would have set for yourself 6 months in, especially as you gain a greater understanding of your organisation. One way I’ve discovered this, for example, is through how I ended up developing some of my end-of-placement targets in ways I wouldn't have expected when I first laid out my SMART goals. Another way I’ve found this is linked to the second tip that I gave, where I ended up discovering new opportunities for my personal and professional development that I was not aware of when I first started, such as my involvement with one of the group interventions that the service I work in offers for the young people we see.
Essentially, if I had not introduced some flexibility into the targets I set for myself back in September/October, I feel I would have been limiting myself, especially since I had been slightly pessimistic about my potential when I started out.
The above 5 points have all helped me throughout my placement and in making the most of my year. If you’re considering a placement or are about to start one, hopefully these tips will be as useful to you as they have been to me!
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